Vista isn't Bad ...

[RoyGBiv]

But it is obnoxious.

Yes, this is a lengthy rant.

Up until about a month ago, I had played with Vista here and there, but I hadn't actually done anything with a computer with Vista installed for any length of time. I'd seen enough before to know it was just another Microsoft OS. I didn't experience anything that made me like it any more than XP, but I didn't see or experience anything that made me hate it either. Well, that's true if we remove the whole underlying philosophy behind its production and the nods given to the media industry, but those are only technical things on the surface. As an operating system, I have to admit it isn't too bad. I still prefer XP, mostly, I'm sure, because other than my own machine I tend to deal with older hardware, and Vista is a PITA on older hardware.

Turns out its a PITA on newer hardware of certain kinds also.

This is what I found obnoxious. The machine I used with Vista is a new Acer laptop (let me say that again ... it's a NEW laptop) that is marketed as a Vista certified laptop. Now, what does this mean? I know what it means, technically, and I know what it means under the surface, but what does it imply in terms of marketing? The obvious answer is that "certified," to most people, means this machine meets all the specs to run Vista reasonably well, and you should expect not to have issues when you buy this thing. (It wasn't me that bought it, FWIW, but a friend who had to beg me and pay me with several helpings of lasagna to mess with it.)

That machine did not work in a way I would even call reasonably unreasonable. It was damn near useless as it came from the factory, slightly less useless once I turned off a lot of useless services. I could go into the laundry list of reasons no machine with those specs should ever have been certified for Vista, but I'll stick with one, the *most* obnoxious one. It came with 512MB of RAM in it. Now, this wasn't Vista Ultimate. It was Vista Home Basic with very little eye candy running. I could, again, go into a list of all the things monumentally wrong with this, all the things that did in fact work but worked so incredibly poorly that it more convenient to wait and do the same thing on an old Pentium IV running Windows 2000. I'll just mention a few.

It took AN HOUR to install MS Office. One Hour. That's 60 minutes. For Office. I almost threw the thing out the window. Well, I should say it took over an hour because it never finished. After I'd left the house, done some laundry, made a sandwich, them come back, it was still chewing, so I stopped it. (That was another adventure.)

Another example: It wouldn't play video files over ~5MB in size. I didn't test enough to get a precise cutoff. I know was able to play files below that size, and mpgs/avis in the 7-40MB range died while DVDs were their own special kind of torture. Oh, yes, the codecs were installed. We had PowerDVD with a DVD decoder on it since that was one of the selling points of the thing. The videos would start playing, but a few seconds in, and they'd pause ... cache, cache, cache, cache ... play for 20 seconds, pause ... repeat.

And one of the most obnoxious things: I couldn't copy files over about 5MB either, which I'm sure is related to the problem mentioned above. Vista told me nothing of what was going on except to suggest, after a 5 minute wait while it said it was working on something (work is HARD), that my media must be bad. Three other computers in the house had no problems with the media. I tried using a command line to copy and got a bit more information: cyclic redundancy check failure.

Perhaps we have a bad memory chip.

No, it checks out fine using MemTest.

Maybe we have a bad DVD drive.

No ...

I bought a 2GB chip and plugged it in ... and all those problems went away. Completely. Office installed fine. Still took longer than I think it should, but I didn't have time to cook a gourmet meal and balance the national budget using a pencil and an abacus while waiting. Videos play fine. I even turned back on all the services I'd stopped (dozens of 'em) to try to eek out a bit more performance. Everything is groovy.

Now, some might say this is not Microsoft's fault. It's the equipment manufacturer's fault. Of course the equipment manufacturer (or the marketers) do bear some responsibility, but let's head on over to Microsoft and look at just what the system requirements for Vista Home Basic are:

1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
512 MB of system memory
20 GB hard drive with at least 15 GB of available space
Support for DirectX 9 graphics and 32 MB of graphics memory
DVD-ROM drive
Audio Output
Internet access (fees may apply)

Oh, this machine had all that. System builders would be more ethical if they did what people familiar with this sort of thing do and pretty much double (or triple) what MS says the requirements are. (Hell, I think XP Home's memory requirements are like 128MB, which is just absurd, and I refuse to install it on a machine with less than 512MB.) But, it's difficult to blame them totally when MS continually low-balls what it actually takes to run their software in a way that normal people would consider reasonable.

The unfortunate thing for Vista, which I said up front is not bad as an OS(and I mean that), is that this kind of nonsense is what is perpetuating the perception that Vista sucks so much. Average Joe who wants a new computer doesn't have the technical savvy to figure these things out on his own, and he probably lives on a budget and can't figure out why he should spend $1000 dollars on a machine when he can spend $500 on this other one, and they are both "certified" to work with Vista. He just wants to do word processing and e-mail and maybe watching a movie in bed. (Couldn't do any of those on the machine mentioned here out of the box.) You can blame it on ignorant users all you want, just like Linux snobs can blame the ignorance of the masses for not being able to figure out a CLI, but both these points of view are dead wrong, if for different reasons. With MS products, for me, it comes down to money. If I have to pay for this shit, I expect the company selling to me to be honest about their products. We have regulations preventing car dealers from advertising 100mpg on cars that get 20. Hey, they get 100mpg if you coast most of the time going downhill with a stiff wind at your back. And Vista will work with 512MB as long as you don't have more than one window open, turn off half the services, set the desktop theme back to Windows 2000 standard, and don't dare try to play a DVD in it. (And maybe that was unique to this machine, but I reiterate, I put in 2GB, and it worked fine.)

Bottom line: this isn't purely a philosophical issue with me now. Vista is obnoxious because the MS marketing department is filled with the same kind of evil bastards that populate marketing departments everywhere in largely unregulated industries. I don't hate Vista. I still hate Microsoft.

(And Apple and Novel are pushing it.)

[madokie]

1. last fall we purchased a laptop for our son and his family.

it came with a gig of ram and its running vista home premium and I must say it is only one step up from a boat anchor and the only reason its even that high on the list is because it doesn't weigh enough to actually use it as an anchor. I have an nlite hacked version of xp with sp3 that installs without any user imput on my machine and so I wonder if maybe I couldn't use it to load xp on their machine and then toss vista in the trash heap where it belongs.

[RoyGBiv]

5. Maybe ...

The issue with laptops is almost always drivers for specific hardware. My touch pad is what gave me fits on my old laptop. A fresh install of Windows 98 (what was current at the time I bought it) wouldn't activate the touch pad, so I had to plug in a mouse and find the driver for it. And that was fun because this machine had no ethernet port, and trying to plug in the cable modem through the USB port with 98 was just a nightmare. Well, plugging it in wasn't a problem. Getting it to work, however ...

Anyway ... I've run across a lot of stories of people trying to take laptops they've purchased and install XP on them running into these sorts of issues. I'm not real clear on the details, and maybe that's overblown. Haven't paid much attention really, but I suppose I might investigate it to see how much of an adventure it would be to install XP on my friend's machine. Even with the 2GB and everything running fairly smoothly, it still has hiccups when doing major things, like PhotoShopping.

She'd also have to cook for me less since that's her payment for working through these issues ... hmmm, maybe I should reconsider that idea. Maybe Microsoft is doing me a favor. :-)

[Dont_Bogart_the_Pretzel]

11. I know what you mean,

Our new HP laptop had(!) Vista Ultimate, I like nLite.. I coudn't get it to install win-xp until I found out and tried nLite and custom build including SP2 and all the Vista hardware drivers/software for Vista.

[Gore1FL]

20. It needs more under the hood

minimum 2 gB minimum and 256 mb on the video card.

Anything less with vista is a nightmare--it'll run, but it's a nightmare.

[hobbit709]

2. I tried Vista Ultimate on a machine I built.

Athlon 64 X2 4800+, 2Gb dual channel RAM, Nvidia GeForce 8400 video card. Pretty eyecandy as you said. I noticed that during the install, you can't tell what is happening so you think it stalled. Had to figure out where it hid a lot of the functions/tweaks. A given category on the control panel doesn't necessarily allow you to make those adjustments. I have 4 removable drive trays-each with a 200Gb Seagate drive. I installed Windows 2000 Pro, XP Pro, Vista Ultimate, Ubuntu 7.10. The one with the least setup and configuration hassles was W2K. It was basically a tie between XP and Ubuntu for second. Vista ran 3rd. Performance on all of them was in the same order. This was at the basic install level on all of them-i.e. OS and drivers. Once I installed various software apps, W2K slowed down the most in relation to before but it stll ran faster than Vista afterwards. I tried these setups since that is mostly what I see on customer's machines. None of the businesses that I deal with want Vista since it would involve upgrading too much hardware that they can't afford. I have one person that still runs their entire shop on a couple of K6-2 500MHz with 128Mb RAM and Win98. It keeps their books and inventory just fine and they see no need to upgrade. I did show them how to make backups of their data files and how to clean the clutter from 98.

[JPettus]

3. You may want to check out the class action lawsuit

Against Microsoft for their deceptive marketing on "Vista certified." From the sounds of it, you would qualify.

[RoyGBiv]

4. Oh, I wouldn't ...

My friend, who bought this laptop, might. She's always looking for an angle, so I might mention it to her. :-)

I made a deal with myself not to purchase Vista no matter how tempted I got by games, which is my weakness and the main reason I keep a Windows installation at all. I did get a licensed copy of Vista from my former employer, but I've never never messed with it more than a little and have since wiped that hard drive. I'm actually not sure if it's technically legal for me to have it now, but they didn't ask me to give it back when I resigned, so it's still sitting around here somewhere.

[Occulus]

13. The only reason I would ever want Vi$ta is for DX10

and Micro$oft could have coded it for WinXP. They just didn't want to make the effort. The DX10 visual effects in Crysis will display in WinXP with a config file hack. Micro$oft lied outright when they said Vi$ta was required for the visual effects provided by DX10.

Someone with lots of money needs to step up and fund the OpenGL standard so it a) does everything that DX10 does and b) gets written for by game developers. DirectX needs to die, just because Micro$oft were bastards about DX10.

Sorry about my arbitrary attitude, but this one just ticks me off. They made DX10 a selling point for Vi$ta and hurt PC gamers in the process.

[DaveJ]

6. Apple is worse, IMO

Apple takes false advertising to the extreme.

I remember when Apple hired mass numbers of temp workers (something I'm opposed to right away) to distribute cards that appeared to offer $20 in free music downloads, when they actually just had 20 preselected songs to download. It was just a gimmick to get people to register for ITunes.

They falsely imply in their ads that Macs can do more than Windows PCs, such as video processing, graphic applications, etc etc. To us that seems ridiculous, but a computer illiterate might actually believe them.

I'm also upset that Apple has somehow gotten the most technologically illiterate among us to think that they invented the MP3 player! All they've done is managed to somehow make music proprietary to them. There are much better and affordable MP3 players than Ipods!

OTOH, I understand upgrading is easier on a Mac than on a PC. But, I think the trick is to get a PC preloaded with Vista that you've tested and researched first and know works well. Don't try to upgrade, since there are so many variables involved in the hardware. I never saw a MS ad that states upgrading to Vista is easy. Buy it preinstalled, or wait 5 years for a better PC, or don't bother. Just my opinion.

[RoyGBiv]

7. Apple's been out to lunch for awhile ...

I've given the company more of a pass previously because I thought their operating system/hardware combinations were better, that is something that works more like it is advertised to work.

But, yeah, their obsession with proprietary stuff and essentially claiming ownership of the very idea of something like an MP3 player has long been obnoxious. I remember when I was a teenager someone with an Apple IIe harassing me 'cause I had a lowly Trash 80 COCO-II because the graphics on his games were so much better. Someone piped up in my defense, saying something like, "Well, maybe so, but he doesn't have to spend $500 on a new piece of equipment every time he wants to play a game." (The COCO had clones or outright ports of most of the popular Apple games at the time, but the color effects were accomplished with dithering rather than a fuller pallet.)

As for preloaded Vista, that was in fact the problem with the machine I mentioned here. It was pre-loaded. One shouldn't be able to purchase a machine with Vista already on it that runs it as poorly as this one did, unless they're masochists or something and demand it. I have less of a complaint about those who go out and purchase the OS and put it on an otherwise perfectly good system they already have. People who do that take on the responsibility of doing their own homework on it. But if you don't have a system, want one, and are limited to the options of an Apple or Vista machine, the consumer shouldn't have to take on the responsibility of determining whether the companies involved in putting that machine together are actually advertising it properly. I've yet to run across an Apple machine that didn't at least run the way it was *advertised* to run, regardless of how much they exaggerate their superiority at certain tasks. I see machines with Windows on them all the time that just can't do what the company that sold it said it could do.

My favorite example of this is the Windows Media Center machines that were being sold, placing special emphasis on all the video elements, including the latest DVD player, a top-of-the-line wide-screen monitor, etc. ... and then not coming with any software that would let you view commercial DVDs.

[Deja Q]

9. The chap at best buy claims OS X needs only 40MB

No joke.

I bit my tongue that day, especially that 17 year old creep was singing his dance and wagging his tail to a senior citizen couple... and macs cost more for the same amount of power in your average Windows PC.

I used to like Apple, but in recent years they've really let the worms in to play...

[Sentath]

8. Ok, now try setting up dial-up on it

I think you'll come around to hating at least that aspect of vista pretty quickly.

The path to the setup wizard is circuitous, and if something doesn't work the way Vista wants it to it gives a lovely user friendly error that says nothing about what didn't work, only that it didn't and would you like to try again. I understand that people freaked out about the weird error messages and numbers coughed up by previous M$ os's (oses?) but at least that gave us techs a breadcrumb or two to start trying to fix things.

I've heard about vista's logging, but have yet to successfully get a customer to access it for me.

[Thepricebreaker]

10. Thats like having a $100,000 car with a 2 cil engine..

Why would you possibly have dialup with Vista... If you can afford vista.. you can at least afford $15.00 for DSL..

[Sentath]

12. Unfortunately, if you live more than 15,000

cable feet (thats 15 thousand effective feet of cable, as measured by resistance and/or capacitance) from a telephone company central office or DSL capable remote terminal (a fairly expensive bit of hardware) then No DSL For You.

Like most of rural Ks

Where I live and work

[Gore1FL]

14. the minimums are to run it at all

Anything less than 2 gig, you wait onthe hard drive all the time.

the minimum video memory you really need is 256, or otherwise it eats MB memory, leaving you even less.

I also recommend a core 2 duo minimum with 4mb L2 cache and a a Front side bus of 800Mhz.

Otherwise Vista will just piss you off.

I had vista loaded on a PC at work for testing. It was a screaming core 2 duo with a FSB of 1330Mhz, a 256 MB video card, but only had 1 GB of memory. It was a dog.

If anything I listed is low, no matter how good everything else is, you'll have a bad experience.

[RoyGBiv]

15. Yes, and that's the problem ...

Microsoft lists the specs I quoted in my missive as "recommended," not minimums. You and I may know that's bunk, but the average computer user doesn't.

[charlie]

16. *chuckle*

Since we're talking about Vista's marketing dept...
Heh... this little confection is... well, it's kind of... it's sorta...
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!
**deep breath**
"Vista, gotta get me some!"
BWAAAA-HAAA-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPv8PPl7ANU

[RoyGBiv]

17. Oh. My. God.

What has been seen cannot be unseen.

[charlie]

18. As dorky as it is

the marketing droids have it better than the developers, who have to sit through Ballmer doing his Scary Golem Run Amok to get pumped :D

[hunter]

19. No, no, it can't be... Somebody brought back a video from HELL.

:scared:

[Deja Q]

21. MS pushed it to my machine yesterday

(I accepted the download and install)

Went through without a hiccup and with SP1, no more RAM is utilized but is rather faster. (maybe they upped it since the initial release, or my previous install was corrupted in some way. )

[Gore1FL]

22. I think

they added some pre-install patches to their updates to solve issues.

[Deja Q]

23. Correct

The 32-bit version would be up to 400mb, the 64-bit version up to 700mb.

My download was only 121MB (64-bit), but SP1 did speed things up the way the other patches did not.

They normally put out pre-sp1 patches, this time including a Trend Internet Security fix. :)

[Gore1FL]

24. I put SP1 on a vanilla image when I was building one for work

popped in there with no issue. At Home it hiccupped at first, but after a single blue screen it has been working ok.

When is the next Windows coming out?

It seems like they have an "every other" thing going.

Dos was a good seller

O/S 2 sucked (and IBM got it)

Windows was a Good seller

The first NT sort of died.

95 was a Good Seller

98 sort of bombed at first and then SE improved it a bit

NT 4.0 worked out OK

ME sort of died

XP was a good seller

Vista bombed...


The next one should be gold....

The biggest problem with Vista, and I mentioned it before on this thread, is they made to many claims that it would work on hardware, but didn't mention it wouldn't work well. Put it on a decent PC with a decent FSB, decent amount of memory, and a decent processor, it actually is a pretty nice setup. (Though their sysprep could be documented in a more meaningful way... I had to do a lot of trial and error to get that to work the way I wanted) Not many people deal with that side of things though. In one sense it is a neat system. It sure is counter intuitive, though.

[RoyGBiv]

25. It's that "decent" that bugs me ...

Why on gopod's green earth does Grandma Biv, whose most intensive computer task is writing her son an e-mail using some gawdawful html formatted style sheet that really screws with my text-only e-mail preferences, need the kind of horsepower it takes to run Vista? Really?

The few people who really need that kind of horsepower are those who do things like intensive number crunching, design graphics (particularly 3d rendering), and video/audio editing. And gamers.

But even with these people, when they plop Vista onto that machine they use for all this stuff, their needs increase yet again simply because they need the horsepower just for the silly operating system.

It's not a new complaint I have, I understand. The code is inefficient and bloated, in part because software engineers do less engineering these days than feature puking. And of course it's not just Microsoft either. It's almost everyone. Mozilla was getting way too big for its britches as well, but, quite recently, seemed to have taken seriously the "memory leaks" complaints and the browser's rather huge footprint, considering their whole philosophy was originally based on keeping things simple and browser oriented.

Look at Office 2007. What a pig. It does *nothing* I need it to do on a daily basis that 10-year-old iterations of the same thing can't do (and without having to search through a nested options menu that I am sure is leading to my heart problems), software I could run on a Pentium IV. But you take that nonsense they have now, combine it with the Bloat Monster that is the current versions of most operating systems, and suddenly you need a liquid nitrogen cooled system just to write a freakin' letter.

It's absurd.

OnEdit: *Ahem* Sorry 'bout that. Little rant there.

What I was originally intending to say is that I've got perfectly "decent" hardware I can't use anymore with Windows because I can't get a legal license for a version that will run on it. Thankfully, there's Linux. The only reason I "need" the dual core processor system I have now is because of the video editing I do. And I'd need more than I have if I tried doing it under Vista.

[Gore1FL]

26. Don't get me wrong, I agree with you

I remember an old joke going around circa 1993-1994 about the benefits of Windows 3.1 that claim the chief one was it gave hardware manufacturers an incentive to create faster machines.

Vista was a step back into that realm.

They did some really positive things with it, but I think they forgot to concentrate on the impact it would have on the users--especially those who couldn't readily upgrade to a machine that really could handle it. I like that they made installation faster and simpler (considering it is huge compared to even XP which is no dwarf. --but installation is (presumably) a one time thing for most users.

I totally get where you are coming from.

I think the next O/S will take more of that into account.